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Wednesday, 27 July 2011

the story of Mr BooHoo, chapter 2

The second chapter of the sad but fictional story of Mr BooHoo was also written by me, today, on a page of a silly old generic nameless notebook (I have two of these, they have the same cover but one is bigger. I wrote it in the bigger because the smaller one is full).

Chapter @ (2) (the bureaucrats)

There were a few things that made Mr BooHoo feel....welllll, boohoo-er. For example bureaucrats had this effect on him. Perhaps this happened because Mr BooHoo was not particularly tall and their desks intimidated him by comparison. He felt even worst when the large desks were covered with paper, manuals, manuals on the manuals, manuals on how to rephrase the manuals, manual dictionaries and multiple addendums to all the above, stalked around circular official and rectangular semi-official stamps. Or, perhaps this was because they used words like "crime" and "fine" lightheartedly while staring at him with colourless unidentifiable eyes and a scolding expression. As if it was his fault that he wasn't constantly reading their latest manuals. In addition to that, they all seemed to be wearing glasses, even the ones that didn't. More specifically the kind of spectacles that fall to the end of a nose of a sort-sited person.

He was not excessively anti-social. He interacted with people, paid the bills and went to the post-office without any issues what-so-ever. It was the money related business he did not like. He never had much money anyway and he was not particularly fond of them. Yet, he had no issues with them either. He also like numbers, he found them relaxing and he often counted and listed his possessions. Yet, he experienced numbers in the world of bureaucracy quite differently. There, numbers replaced words and remembering meaningless codes is impossible and meaningless in every realm. Further on, there were all those theoretical sums of money that also made little sense to him. Also, Mr BooHoo estimated his time rather highly. He never felt there was enough of it and he didn't like spending it, unless he had it in abundance (like on Sunday afternoons, or when you arrive at the airport too early and you have enough time to look around, or on the bus). At that he resembled to the well-known rabbit that is always soooo late. He detested waiting rooms, and making him wait was the worst. There were times he felt he could not take the stress of waiting to see what would happen to his life and thought of ending it prematurely, so as to see what happens in the very end. Bureaucratic procedures always took too long. He would wait patiently, for the clerks to slowly stir their coffee, talk on the phone about vacation and gossip or re-arrange the manuals on their desks. Then they would type something and make a judgement. Mr BooHoo wanted to hit them on the head with a mallet, or just melt and escape through the sewage.